Andrej Karpathy
A founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, now researching at Anthropic and widely followed for his plain-spoken explanations of how models work.
Andrej Karpathy is one of the few people in AI whose name works as a shorthand. He was part of the founding team at OpenAI, then ran the AI group at Tesla that built the vision system for its driver assistance, then went back to OpenAI, then started an education company called Eureka Labs. Since May 2026 he has been doing pre-training research at Anthropic.
What makes him worth knowing is not the CV but the teaching. He writes and films long, careful explanations of how language models actually work, aimed at people who want to understand rather than be impressed, and he is unusually willing to say when a result is a fun demo rather than real evidence. When he tries something odd with a new model and posts the code, the AI world tends to pay attention.